Daughter of Finsbury Park van attack victim speaks about her father – video

The Finsbury Park terrorist, Darren Osborne, will spend at least 43 years behind bars after being jailed for life for his murderous attack on Muslims in London last June.

Osborne was sentenced on Friday to concurrent whole life terms for the murder of Makram Ali and the attempted murders of other people, with the minimum term of more than four decades to be served, having being found guilty at Woolwich crown court the day before.

The judge said he attacked innocent people, but his particular choice to target a group wearing traditional Islamic dress reflected his “ideology of hate towards Muslims”. Mrs Justice Cheem-Grubb said: “Over a weekend in mid-June you acted to kill, maim, injure and terrify as many people as you could.

“This was a terrorist attack. You intended to kill.”

Speaking on behalf of her family outside court, Ali’s daughter Ruzina Akhtar said her father would “always stay in our hearts, his laughter will echo the walls of our home, his smile will be reflected in our eyes, his memories will be alive in our conversations”.

Osborne drove his rented van into a crowd gathered around Ali, who had collapsed due to an existing condition. Twelve people were injured, some of them seriously.

How London mosque attacker became a terrorist in three weeks

Read more

Sentencing Osborne, the judge said he had become “rapidly radicalised over the internet, encountering and consuming material put out … from those determined to spread hatred of Muslims on the basis of their religion” in the weeks prior to the attack.

Play Video

0:41

CCTV footage of moment Darren Osborne attacked London mosque – video

His trial heard he regularly read material from the former EDL leader Tommy Robinson and the far-right group Britain First, among others. “Over the space of a month or so, your mindset became one of malevolent hatred. You allowed your mind to be poisoned by those who claim to be leaders,” Cheema-Grubb told him.

The court also heard that the catalyst for Osborne’s descent was the BBC drama-documentary Three Girls, which focused on the grooming and sexual abuse of young girls in Rochdale by British-Pakistani Muslim men. “Your research and joining Twitter early in June 2017 exposed you to a great deal of extreme racist and anti-Islamic ideology,” Cheema-Grubb said.

She contrasted that with the actions of a local imam, Mohammed Mahmoud, who exhorted the crowd of mainly Muslim men not to hurt Osborne and to deliver him up to face justice.

“This was a demonstration of true leadership. His behaviour throws into sharp relief the bile spewed out online from those who aspire to lead the haters,” Cheema-Grubb said.

“Not because his exhortation to desist from punishing the perpetrator was remarkable but because he had the strength of character to do the right thing under pressure. He chose to respond to evil with good.

“His response should be everyone’s response, whether it is to the evil of child grooming and abuse in Rochdale or the evil of terrorist atrocities in our cities.”

Osborne initially offered no defence to the two charges but changed his mind just as the prosecution was due to close its case against him last week. Taking the stand, he claimed a man named Dave had been at the wheel, despite CCTV showing him alone in the van and only one person leaving it after the attack.

Cheema-Grubb said the jury “saw through your pathetic last-ditch attempt to deceive them”. Afterwards, Akhtar told reporters: “It was particularly hard for us to have to sit in court and listen to Darren Osborne deny he had done anything wrong.”

During the sentencing hearing, Akhtar said she could not describe the pain she and her relatives had suffered. Her father was taken from them “in a cruel way by a very narrow-minded, heartless being”, she said in a statement read to the court by the prosecutor, Jonathan Rees QC.

She and her family had struggled to sleep since the attack – the scene of which she still has to pass most days on her way to work, Akhtar said.

She described the anguish at having to wait 48 hours to identify her father’s body. “My heart was shattered when I saw my father lying in the morgue. I couldn’t see his smile.” The family’s grieving could not begin properly until the trial was concluded, she said.

Akhtar went on: “She still sees my father around the house all the time. He was very much a family man ... this is how he will be remembered.”

Osborne told the judge: “God bless you, thank you” as he was led from the dock to begin serving his sentence. The 224 days he spent on remand will be deducted from the minimum term.

The jury took about an hour to unanimously convict Osborne over the premeditated attack in June 2017.

Ruzina Akhtar, the daughter of the Finsbury Park van attack victim Makram Ali, gives a short statement following the sentencing of Darren Osborne. Akhtar described her father as, 'like the victim of most terrorism – entirely innocent – making his violent death all the more hurtful'